Shelley Keith

HighEdWeb 2009 just wrapped up as a resounding (overall) success. It’s to my increasing satisfaction that this conference gets better and better every year. We’re setting the bar for mix of content and social interaction that, from what I’ve seen and heard from attendees, isn’t really matched anywhere else. The winning mix of great presentations, incredible attendees, and insanely devoted conference organizers make this a must-attend event for me every year…so much so that I actually cornered my University president at an event in his home during budget discussions last spring to pitch why it’s important that I be allowed and funded to attend.

This conference has such a devoted following that even in these unfortunate economic times we had considerable interaction from those who were unable to attend. We always have a bit of non-attendee backchannel traffic, but this year saw the creation of #fakeheweb09 backchannel and Ning site for our fiscally strapped brethren. Their interaction was significant and contributed greatly to the overall success of the conference. Your presence was felt my friends, and you were missed.

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Just in case there’s anyone out there who has not by now heard of our Tuesday keynote issues, you can read about it on this blog, and this one, and this one…and then this one and this one too. (Just a note, I’ve read the non-heweb community blogs, but am holding off on the ones @fienen, @KarlynM, and @nickdenardis wrote until after I publish. I might have to append notes on those later.)  I’m not going to rehash the train wreck. What I am going to do is speak to those who were not in attendance and chose to publicly assume we’re a bunch of disrespectful assholes.

Let me tell you a thing or two about #heweb09 attendees. They are, almost without exception, overworked, underpaid, understaffed, and under-appreciated public servants. These are some of the most brilliant minds in their specialty areas who give non-stop to the web community in the form of infinite sharing, finding solutions to intricate problems, extensive blog posts, and technical and moral support to each other. They give of themselves to their universities and their peers in a way that is simply unparalleled in my experience. Many of them paid their own way to be at this conference for all the reasons I’ve already covered. When the melt-down started, the community response was stunned silence, incredulity, and not a small amount of snark.

wtf and omfg

Monday at the lunch break mypersonal HP Mini was lifted from one of the session rooms. To my knowledge nothing like this has ever happened before at one of our conferences. Everyone in attendance has their own equipment, whether personal or uni owned, and if any one of us *were* going to steal a machine, it’s highly unlikely that it’d be a frickin MINI when there are prized Macs laying around all over the place. I’ve heard a lot of theories, and I’m just not willing to believe it was an attendee.

The response of this overworked, underpaid, overstressed group of “disrespectful assholes”? In addition to the amazing warmth, sympathy, and offers to do a #heweb09 style beatdown on whoever stole my netbook, they (led by the unstoppable @mherzber) started a Facebook Causes fund and pushed the #shelleyfund agenda on Twitter to help me get a new machine. The community rallied around me in a way unlike anything I’d ever been party to. The hugs, donations, and genuinely lovely sentiment still bring tears to my eyes. The result of the netbook fiasco of ‘09, I got a new machine in time for our final lunch together…blubbering like a baby on stage. You people humble me, and I’ll never forget this conference and your incredible generosity (I’m talking to you @tonydunn).

Catastraposter

In yet another tale of the outpouring of support for one of our own, attendee extraordinaire @Robin2go had her own serious issue when her hard drive corrupted containing the only available copy of her poster presentation. We found her in tears in the conference office upset about being unable to present something she’d obviously been working very hard on for some time.  After a brief discussion as to the nature of her presentation we came up with a plan and kicked it into gear. Her poster, titled “Campfire Tales: Wikis and Wonder for Community Engagement” gave us the inspiration for what turned into a really fantastic (or so I heard, I was unfortunately too busy to actually go see it once it was up) “poster” displayed using a circle of 5 (?) notebooks each running one of the online components of her presentation. There were people running around everywhere hijacking machines and printing signs so she could do what she does best…

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

It is my honor and privilege to be counted as one of you. My paltry contribution to #heweb is, in my mind, the very least I can do to help give back to a community that, even before the #shelleyfund, has given me so much. I intend to append a list of those who donated to the #shelleyfund as well as build a Skinit to go on the mini (engraving was perhaps a little over enthusiastic since I can’t seem to find anyone who can actually do what I want done). I’ve got a comprehensive list, but since I was a little bloody wasted on Tuesday night and people were throwing money at me like I was Pamela Anderson doing a pole dance for PETA, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop a tweet my way if you gave me cash and aren’t @tonydunn, @tsand or @cmk22.

In a related note, I will be writing an extensive post related to my poster “From All Me to MU” as promised. I’m just not sure it’ll be done before Monday.

Also, everyone please tell @thinkgeek thanks for the APS door prizes. They rocked out with the donation.

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Well after hours of poking and prodding at Facebook, here’s what I’ve got to show for it.

To setup your page, click “Businesses” in the Facebook footer.

At the Business Services page, choose “Facebook Pages”.

Then you create your page:

You’ll be asked to establish what type of page (Education) and the name of the page (Your School). It’s important to note here that at this point, you can create a page for ANY organization…there’s no validation of any kind. This is a scary scary thing.

Your initial view will look like this. Most of the interface is classic Facebook.

When you click “Edit my page” you’re presented with this:

You’ll notice a new Applications Menu option, “Page Manager”. It wasn’t initially in the top 5, I had to drag it up from the lower hidden menu.

There are 3 applications pre-installed on your page: Events, Photos, and Video. You get the same photo album capabilities that individual profiles enjoy, and the ability to create semi-robust events. My only beef, I want to be able to put a URL in the event creation screen somewhere to link to more information (like our University calendar or news).

I did add the Feedheads app so I could pull our news and calendar feeds into the Facebook page, but a glitch in it has caused the results to show up on my personal profile instead of the University page. Mario Romero, the developer of Feedheads, has responded that they’re hoping to get the bugs out by the weekend.

I created additional admins by simply inviting my friends (i.e. coworkers and student employees in my office) to accept admin status. The process was pretty easy on my end, but they all had issues either accepting the invite or finding their way back to the page if they hadn’t chosen to “Add to my organizations”. These additional admins are not getting the “Page Manager” menu item at this point, it’s only if you actually created a page. This is a usability issue they’re going to have to work out. The UWebD list reports similar problems. Also, the page doesn’t show up in searches. Someone indicated they’re read something about 3 days before search would work, but I couldn’t find that info anywhere. I’ve put up an announcement as a “Share” within my friends and anticipate a little traffic from the curious.

I did experience an issue where the University hours were “forgotten” once, and I’m pretty sure this was caused by simply clicking on the “Basic Info” edit box and then navigating away without saving. Stephanie Leary of A&M reports the same problem.

The photo album app is going to be great for us as it’ll allow users to comment, hopefully generating some activity we’ve been missing out with our lack of a robust photo album. The problem(s) with the albums: (1) users can’t tag, (2) the photo purchase option is only available for those with admin rights (as far as I’ve been able to determine). For higher ed especially, the ability to tag and use photos the same way as individual profiles would be key. It might be important to note that unless a user chooses to become a fan of your school, they won’t even be able to comment on the pictures, and there’s no instructions indicating this at the photo level.

All in all I’m very excited, but it’s still a little green. They’re going to have to offer us some clarification, and beef up some of the places they left out (tagging…seriously). I think most of it is simple oversight, you can’t think of everything. I’m looking forward to seeing how they overcome and/or compensate for these issues. Until then, take a look at what we built in a day.

Facebook just announced the addition of a feature they’re calling “Facebook Pages”, which adds an interesting twist to the recent (and not so recent) ongoing discussions among higher ed pros about the uses of Facebook for recruiting, retention, and general communication with our various student audiences.

The Facebook Blog entry really only focused on use of this new feature for bands, brands, business and celebrities, but I’ll be really interested to see if there are any restrictions that prevent higher ed orgs from taking advantage of this. It could be just the solution we’ve been looking for to actually create a full fledged institutional Facebook presence while still playing by the rules.

I’m off to investigate further.

“I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating. I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”

-Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Holy cow, this was a shocker! The buzz around her death has been tremendous (and who friggin cares how TrimSpa is going to recover?), and I’ve got friends who have reacted very strongly…but the only thing I can think of (outside of that poor baby girl) is that we now know who all the drag queens will be impersonating for the next 20 years. Madonna was getting so worn out. RIP.